The Voice Of The Silence
by ThreeOranges
Summary: Spoilers for TSFT. Wilhelmina Wyatt meets the Victorian patriarchy. Not pretty. Warnings for medical procedures and general injustice. Slight crossover with TV series Bramwell.


**Author's note:** Many thanks to LunaEquus for betaing this fic! It was inspired by a cynical reaction to the two trawlers in the opening chapter of TSFT. (Trust me, such men would never have let a perfectly good body sink to the bottom of the Thames when further profit could have been made from it.)

It also shows the influence of the British ITV series BRAMWELL, a likeable Victorian-era series set in London. The character of Sir Herbert Hamilton and the horrifying operation can both be found in BRAMWELL, Series 1, Episode 1, written by Lucy Gannon. In addition, the brief moment of Latin is inspired by the séance scene in the BBC ghost story THE TREASURE OF ABBOT THOMAS (1973), and the title of this fic is taken from a tract by the Victorian Spiritualist Helena Blavatsky. The Order, the Rakshana, the Realms and the character of Wilhelmina Wyatt are all copyright Libba Bray. Anything left over is mine.

**THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE**

**by ThreeOranges**

Sometimes he dreams of her. It's not a dream he wishes for, or relishes, but he cannot stop the sight of her striding towards him. She is vivid against the grey grimy walls of the East End: her chilly lavender dress, muddied by the streets she used to walk, flutters around her ankles. There is a plain black straw hat on her head, affixed with a long pearl-headed pin, and she carries a writing-slate beneath one arm. Her face – he tries to avoid looking at her face. He would know its features again amongst a crowd of thousands, but he doesn't want to lift his gaze to hers.

He will not look at her, yet she still approaches him. Sometimes, she stops and opens her mouth.

All the voice she ever had was the scratch and slap of chalk on slate, and that's the sound he now hears coming from her parted lips. An unintelligible insect screech, so loud and piercing and filled with hatred that it always forces him, shuddering, out of his sleep.

Sometimes his wife will wake as well, hold him, ask what has so disturbed him.

_A dead woman,_ he longs to say (but never will): _a dead woman, who will never be at rest_.

**I.**

She was waiting in the hospital corridor when he arrived at the East London Hospital in the first week of his training. He saw her sitting on the bench against the stark white tiles - a little girl of no more than eight, her neck wrapped in a woollen scarf and her ginger hair fixed in stiff, shiny plaits behind her shoulders. A porcelain-faced doll with straw-coloured ringlets sat in her lap, its painted smile a painful contrast with the girl's sullenness. Beside her sat a middle-aged woman in grey muslin, a cameo brooch at her neck. A slightly disapproving expression spread across the woman's features as she took in his youth and nervousness. _She_, it was plain, was far too important for her child be examined by a mere trainee doctor.

And when he opened his mouth, he saw her wince. Oh dear, she doubtless thought, was it entirely necessary for her to confide in a _Scot_?

However, as no other medical staff were available, the apparition in grey soon unbent enough to impart the basic facts to him. She was Mrs Spence, the founder and headmistress of Spence Academy, an exclusive school for young ladies south of the River. The little girl by her side was Miss Wyatt, her newly-orphaned niece, and the reason for their visit was that she was unable to speak so much as a word.

"How long has this been - ?"

"Since birth, I believe," Mrs Spence had replied, a spark of irritation in her tone. "Her mother never saw fit to consult a doctor about it – she always thought the girl would 'grow out of it'. When I attended my sister's funeral last week and saw the girl was silent as ever, I thought I'd better take her to a reputable physician. So tell me - what appears to be the cause?"

She was testing him, judging from her starchy tone, and his mind was instantly buffeted by a thousand newly-learned facts - none of which seemed particularly relevant to the case in hand. "Well, it's not the easiest condition to diagnose," he prevaricated desperately. "It could be – well – any number of illnesses. Did the girl perhaps suffer a blow to the head in her infancy?"

"Not to the best of my knowledge, no. _Wilhelmina! _Child!" Mrs Spence turned and laid one finger on the little girl's chest. "Think carefully, now. Can you remember ever having been struck, or falling and injuring your poor head?"

The little girl shook her bowed head, not looking up even when her aunt stood and led her away to a nearby office.

The doctor thought no more of the encounter, and it was only at the exhausting hour of four o'clock, passing over the main vestibule, that he saw the mute girl again. She was sitting alone in a bare waiting-room, adjacent to the doctor's office. All the weariness of neglect was visible in her face and posture, and the sight of her caught at his heart.

"Well hello there!" he ventured, too-heartily, leaning in from the doorway. "And how did we get on at Dr Hamilton's?"

The girl looked up, saw him, then – and this surprised him, for he hadn't taken note of it before – she brought a wide, ready-lined school-slate from behind her back. In a pocket of Dolly's dress lodged a few sticks of chalk. Reaching for one, she began to scrawl him a message. Intrigued, the young doctor moved slowly into the room to sit beside her.

_He doesn't know what's wrong with me. _

"I see." It seemed that, against his will, the child had drawn him into a conversation. "Well, I'm sorry to hear that. What did he say?"

_He wanted to talk to Auntie Genius. That's why I'm here_. She left the letters on the slate for a few seconds, then, satisfied that he'd read and understood them, she wiped the slate clean with her sleeve and began afresh. _Would you like to see my poem?_

When he nodded, she wrote:

_Miss Mina Wyatt_

_Is ever so quiet_

"Very good," he said, after an initial flush of awkwardness. "You made that up, did you?"

_Yes. I like writing poems_. Scrubbing the slate again, she continued, _Am I a good girl?_

"Well, I should hope you are!"

She frowned, then scrawled, _Mother said God made me quiet so I could be good. Does that mean I would be wicked otherwise?_

Oh, wonderful. An Infant Phenomenon with a taste for philosophy; just what he needed after a tiring day. "Well, I can't hope to know the workings of Divine Providence, I'm afraid. But I think we would all be wicked without faith, wouldn't we?"

She nodded. _I want to be good. Auntie says if I'm good she'll take me to a wonderful place_.

"Aha! Is she planning a trip to the seaside?"

She wrinkled her nose. _NO! Not the seaside. When I'm there I'll have lots of sisters to play with. Do you have a sister?_

"Only brothers, I'm afraid."

An impish smile, a split-second that wiped the sullenness from her and made her look almost pretty. _You poor man. Would you like to come with Auntie and me?_

"Well, that's a kind invitation -"

"Ah, Dr Murrie!" Dr Hamilton, the portly blond assistant director of the East London Hospital, stood in the doorframe of his office, looking vaguely amused at what he saw. Startled, the young doctor rose from the bench as Mrs Spence swept in and caught the child by her arm.

"Good heavens, child! Just _look_ what a mess you've made of your sleeve!"

"That was my fault, Mrs Spence," Dr Murrie volunteered hastily. "The child and I were having a – conversation."

"You should _never_ have let her spoil her dress this way!" Angrily, Mrs Spence slapped back-and-forth at the girl's sleeve, almost as if she expected to see great clouds of chalk-dust rise from beneath her open palm. "Never – never spoil your clothes like this again, Wilhelmina! Am I understood?"

The girl cringed, looking more miserable than ever. Murrie watched with sympathy as her aunt ceremonially thanked Dr Hamilton, then swept from the hospital, dragging her unwilling chalk-stained cargo in her wake.

Hamilton eyed their exit smugly. "Tsk tsk, my dear Murrie, it looks like you have a lot to learn," he murmured. "Need I mention that you forgot the first rule a doctor should live by?"

"What's that, doctor?"

Hamilton's expression grew more insufferable. "Never, _never_ admit culpability! If you're to work here, you need to expunge the phrase 'my fault' from your vocabulary – you're a doctor, and doctors need the freedom to make a honest mistake now and again."

"Doctor – what was wrong with the lass?"

"Our little Miss Wyatt? I'm afraid she appears to be suffering from hysteria."

"_Hysteria?_" Murrie stopped short, his eyes examining Hamilton for evidence of a joke. "But she couldn't have been more than eight! Isn't she too _young_ for hysteria?"

"Sadly, there's no other diagnosis that fits. A mental retardation manifesting itself in the degeneration of the physical faculties – hysteria, plain and simple. Young girls can often show symptoms of the full-blown disease in infancy: a tendency to fancies, an over-active imagination, you know the sort of thing."

"But surely that's just being a child, Doctor?"

Hamilton turned and bayoneted him with a steely look. "And the second rule for doctors at this institution is that juniors – _Dr Murrie_ - will not contradict their betters without due cause. When you have written and published studies of female hysteria, you will have the authority to argue your case against me. Until then, I'd recommend you hold your tongue and let others think you a fool - it's far preferable to opening your mouth and leaving no doubt at all!"

Still smarting from the insult, Murrie followed Hamilton back into the main wards and resumed his consultation with the patients. Gradually, the little girl with her slate and her prattle of a "wonderful place" faded from his thoughts, and would not reappear for twenty years.

**II.**

"And your name is - ?"

The shabby-looking man, awash in a baggy long coat, shifted slightly in the chair opposite. "My name is Dr. Van Ripple. I've come on the small matter of my assistant. She has been – somewhat troubled of late."

"_Dr_ Van Ripple? Would you mind spelling that?" After the newcomer had done so, Murrie shot him a sceptical look; strong men had been known to blench before such a glance. "_Medicus es? Si medicus es, Latine loqueris_."

More shifting. "Despite my unusual name I am _not_ a foreigner, Doctor, and I resent being treated as one!"

"And I resent those who use the title of "doctor" when they have no claim to it." Uncharitable though it was, Murrie rather enjoyed catching his patients in a lie: this fellow, with his pretensions and posturing, was an annoyance of the first order. "I merely remarked that if you were a doctor, you would understand elementary Latin."

Van Ripple's moustache quivered in indignation.. "If I were a _medical_ doctor, doubtless I would – but I happen to hold my qualification in the esoteric arts! As it is, Latin is not nearly as important to me as the powers of the long-extinct civilizations. In my opinion the modern world is in danger of losing the ancient lore, the sacred arcana of mysticism and power -"

Murrie waved a hand to silence him. "Oh, of course. The _sacred arcana_ are naturally of prime importance when dealing with the sick and injured. And - talking of such - could you explain exactly what is wrong with your assistant, Mr Van Ripple?"

More squirming. "I have cause to believe that her mind is disturbed, doctor. She seems to have developed an obsession, which has been aggravated by her dependence upon certain medical substances."

"Which substances?"

"Painkillers, doctor. _Cocaine_, doctor. The very same substances prescribed to her for relief with her nightmares have become an end in themselves. You are aware, I trust, of the problems with cocaine?"

Murrie made a discreet note on a sheet of paper - e_vidence of addictive personality -_ then lifted his eyes back to Van Ripple. "Indeed. Like most things, it's a good servant but a bad master. Should I take it that her mental stability has been affected by excessive ingestion?"

"If by that you mean she's gone stark raving mad, then yes."

"Then I should examine her. Would you be so kind as to show me to her?"

The two men strode briskly along the corridor to the communal waiting-room. Amongst a crowd of the sick, the coughing, the palsied and the consumptive sat a woman, richly clad in a lavender silk gown. A plain black straw hat perched on her head and, beneath its brim, her long hair coursed down her shoulders in cinnamon waves.

Dr Murrie looked at her with curiosity. Her eyes met his, and a visible galvanism shot through her body that could only be a sign of recognition. When she extracted a heavy wood-mounted slate from the bag in her lap, he recognized her in his turn. The pathetic fragment of her poem shot across his memory with the speed of an arrow.

"Miss Mina Wyatt."

"You know her?" Van Ripple gaped, his eyes flitting from one to the other in astonishment.

She scrawled fluidly with the chalk, then propped up her slate on her lap for him to read. _You are the doctor I saw when I was a child, are you not? I knew you by your nose._

Thinking back, he would pinpoint the precise beginning of his dislike of her to that instant. Why could she have not been kind – why could she not have softened it, claimed that she knew him by his _eyes_? His teeth gritted hard as he became aware of Van Ripple's soft chuckling beside him, as he strove to control his temper.

"Yes. What appears to be the problem, Miss Wyatt?"

_Has he told you I am mad?_

Murrie flicked a glance over to the charlatan in the long coat. "Yes, he has."

Her shoulders drooped. _Do you think I am?_

"That remains to be seen, doesn't it? Come along to my office."

Leaving Van Ripple behind, the two of them returned to the private sanctum where Murrie began to examine her. He didn't have to search for long – soon enough he found the loosened teeth and scraped enamel, the series of blackened punctures embedded in the skin of her left upper arm.

"Miss Wyatt, it appears you are, at the very least, suffering from a dangerous compulsion. I'm sure the dangers attendant on the use of cocaine would have been explained to you. Yes? Then, pray tell, why should you choose to ignore those warnings?"

_It's the only way I can talk to my aunt Eugenia._

Murrie sighed heavily. So this was all it was – a bereavement so tragic that delusion must seem far preferable to reality. "Miss Wyatt, I have no wish to hurt you, but I must state, here and now, that the whole of London mourned the death of your aunt. The fire at her school occurred - what was it, ten years ago?"

Her stick of chalk scratched a brief negation. _Thirteen_.

"Thank you. Thirteen years ago. And she never escaped the fire, did she? Much as I appreciate the sadness of your loss, I cannot allow you to ruin your health in this way!"

_She did escape. Her body died, but her soul still lives. She is the Tree of All Souls now._ She looked up at him, tense, watching. _You think I am mad?_

A "yes" would close all the avenues along which a doctor and his patient might progress. "Tell me about the Tree of All Souls."

A decisive scrubbing of the slate, then another beginning. _Can I trust you?_

"Of course."

She told him everything – a tale of such intricacy that it left him marvelling at the creativity of lunatics. It all depended on fanatical self-conviction, of course... but how could a mere woman of twenty-odd have dreamt up a systematized after-life of such complexity, such brilliance and darkness? According to her, her late aunt lay embedded within an enormous tree (_the Yggdrasil legend?_ he added to his notes) which fed upon the souls of the dead, and whose stiff bark now enclosed her deeply rotted spirit. _I did not recognize her_, Miss Wyatt scrawled haltingly across her slate. _Whatever was pure and good about her has gone utterly. Monstrous now, she wants only to harness the power of the sisterhood -_

"The sisterhood, Miss Wyatt?"

A sly look crept over her face. _My sisters. Remember I told you how many sisters I would have, when I entered the Realms?_

"There you are, Doctor!" The voice of the hospital director rang out. Sir Herbert Hamilton, knighted only last month, stepped into the office and beamed broadly at the charming scene he found. "Getting on well with the patient? I've just had a chat with her employer, and he seems most anxious for her well-being. I told him she was in very capable hands - you're famous for your mundane miracle-working!"

Dr Murrie opened his mouth to disclaim Sir Herbert's over-generous compliment, but before he could utter so much as a word Miss Wyatt had leapt to her feet and - my God, no, _a knife,_ _where had she possibly found a knife?_ - stood face-to-face with Sir Herbert. The icy silver thread of a dagger's edge emerged from her closed fist, its light reflected in Sir Herbert's widened eyes.

"Miss Wyatt!" Dr Murrie cried, reaching forward in an attempt to overpower her. She twisted round, lifted her hand to bring the dagger higher. Something pressed against Murrie's skin, sank in cleanly - he gasped as a cold shock, unpleasant, thrilled through his arm and then his entire body.

She panicked, flew past Sir Herbert and sprinted away down the corridor. "Stop her! She's got a knife!" cried Sir Herbert to a distant pair of hospital orderlies who immediately launched into pursuit. That done, he turned his attention to Murrie's wound. "My word, Murrie, what on earth happened?"

"I've – no idea, doctor -" her victim gasped, his right hand gripping his bleeding limb tightly. "One minute she was writing out her deranged fantasies, meek as a lamb; the next minute – well, you saw her!"

"Strange indeed," murmured Sir Herbert. "What fantasies were these?"

"Stuff about an invented afterlife – a lunatic's version of Heaven, you might say – it's all there in my notes. How could she _do_ such a thing?"

As Sir Herbert's eye fell upon Miss Wyatt's slate, then upon the pages of Murrie's handwriting, his back stiffened slightly. Scanning the pages again and again his look grew thunderous, then craven, then excessively sleek as he rolled up the papers and deposited them in his waistcoat pocket. "Clearly mad as a hatter," he murmured loudly. "Get some iodine on that wound, old boy, then we'll call the police on her."

_No need_, Dr Murrie thought in relief as the hospital orderlies re-emerged through the far double-doors, carrying the woman's limp body between them. They'd found her clinging to her protesting employer, and it had taken a few sharp blows to Miss Wyatt's head before she'd done the decent thing and lost consciousness. No sign of the weapon in her bodice or the folds of her dress, though they planned to search the hospital corridors for it later on. In the meantime, what was to be done with her?

"I prescribe Cell 49 for her. Strap her up," Sir Herbert replied, barely sparing the inert woman a glance as the men carried her away. "Now, Murrie, let's see if you need stitching... Hmm, that _is_ nasty. Want some gin-and-laudanum whilst I get on with the embroidery?"

Murrie nodded and lay back on a wooden chair, his face ashen and his strength slowly ebbing. As Sir Herbert turned his attention to the crimson mouth freshly-opened in Murrie's skin, the last thing the younger man registered was Sir Herbert's lapel. A silver decoration gleaming against the dark-blue flannel. A decoration – curious-looking – a long curved flourish like a cutlass, with something round superimposed upon it - was it a _skull_?

Then the gin-and-laudanum stunned his blood-starved brain into submission, and Murrie drifted gratefully into sleep.

**III.**

When he risked a glance, it was to see Sir Herbert leaning over the supine body on the operating table.

"She'll be out of the stupor soon," he remarked, his fingers hovering over the pad of cotton wadding pressed against the patient's abdomen. "I really ought to congratulate you on your sterling work with her. These operations are always a risky business..."

The smell of the operation rose up in the back of Murrie's throat - a mingled, foul stench of blood, fear and iodine that left him almost paralysed with the threat of nausea. Eventually it passed, giving him the strength to look properly at the woman who lay there motionless. Now that the anaesthetic mask had been removed from her face he could see the bruise at her jawline, evidence of her struggle with the orderlies that morning. The flaked dryness of her lips. How rough and torn they looked.

Though she hadn't been able to scream, and had had her chalk and slate confiscated, she'd certainly caused fuss and trouble for the hospital staff. On the second day after her removal from the straitjacket, the orderlies had entered to find a scene of shocking vandalism. A stray piece of rock had contained enough chalk for her to etch the image of a gigantic tree against the grey wall – a tree made of stretched sinew and muscle, from whose splayed branches sickly corpses hung.

_THE TREE OF ALL SOULS LIVES_, she'd scrawled beside it. _LISTEN TO ME_.

They hadn't been able to find her dagger. Privately, Murrie suspected her employer of hiding the weapon to protect her, but Van Ripple had sworn his innocence repeatedly and nothing had ever been proved. However, that wasn't important – what mattered was that by not involving the police, the hospital now had the responsibility for her well-being. Now the medical establishment had to find the cause of Miss Wyatt's mania and violence.

"Hysteria," was Sir Herbert's verdict. "The ability to give birth is the divinest gift of God – ah, if only the female of the species always had the strength for the task! Sadly, the pressures often show themselves in heightened irrationality, delusional fallacies, unseemly aggression - all those impulses which cause the woman's behaviour to deviate. Remove the source of the problem, and you remove the problem itself."

"I'm not sure I understand, Sir Herbert."

"The _source of the problem_, man! I'm proposing an ovariectomy. Now come, man, don't look so startled!" Sir Herbert added, clapping Murrie heartily on the back. "Plenty of my female patients have undergone the operation - and found their spirits noticeably improved, once the burden of reproduction has been lifted from their shoulders!"

Murrie exhaled slowly, unconvinced. "But it's a dangerous operation, isn't it? I heard that there are often complications – bleeding, infection?"

"With due care and attention, there's no reason why it shouldn't be a success. Besides, her employer has already given his consent for the operation." His pudgy forefinger pointed to the nearby desk, where a document with a showy calligraphic signature lay uppermost. "She can't prevent it going ahead – and in any case, it's for her own good."

"I see."

The older man gave a delicate cough. "I'm glad we agree on the treatment... because I was rather hoping _you_'d carry out the procedure, old chap."

The proposition was enough to make Murrie gasp. "But – well - I've actually never performed one of those before."

"Nonsense! I've seen you perform cyst removals on the abdomen – the ovariectomy isn't really so different. A wider incision perhaps, but when you come down to it, not so very different! Besides, I'm confident of your abilities."

Murrie had fought against it, but his had not been a sustained battle. Eventually he'd judged it best to simply agree, research the operation and practice every evening on the cadavers in storage. He might not much care for the woman who'd injured him, but he owed it to her not to kill her – especially as the operation itself was one of the riskiest in the whole medical spectrum. _A fifty-percent chance of success_, he'd read. _The first operation by the novice nearly always results in failure_.

But not this time, he thought in relief as he regarded the bloodied tissue that lay in the stainless-steel pan like sweetbreads on a silver platter. He had every reason to feel proud of himself: despite his inexperience he'd beaten the odds and restored a living patient to her full health, both physical and mental. All she needed was to recover for a few days, by which time the full effects should have kicked in. She'd thank him for saving her from such destructive, violent fantasies.

When he went to visit her on the women's ward, five days later, it was to find her sitting up in bed, pale-faced yet strangely alert, almost as if she knew of his visit and was waiting for him. Her eyes seemed to glitter with a mineral darkness. He handed her the confiscated slate and chalk, then enquired how she was feeling.

_Largely the same, save for a curious sense of loss. I should have liked to have borne a child._

"I think you'll find a sane and responsible life a more than fair exchange," he snapped, then instantly regretted it. Of course the woman would be feeling sorry for herself, it was only natural. More gently he added, "Have you any plans upon leaving?"

A strange smile twitched at her mouth._ Hadn't you heard? The plans have been made for me. I'm to be moved to Bedlam._

"Bedlam?" he gaped incredulously. "Oh come now, you can't seriously be suggesting – you – but you've just had an operation to restore your faculties!"

_It wasn't supposed to cure me. I was supposed to die under your knife._

Something in his throat made it hard to breathe. "What on earth are you talking about?"

_Sir Herbert is a member of the Rakshana, sworn enemies of the Order. They would rather see me dead than see the Order return to the Realms_. A sweep of her sleeve. _You were supposed to cause my death. An error on the operating-table. A perfect murder._

It was as if a scalpel had slipped into his own abdomen. Trying to control the sick, lost feeling that threatened to overwhelm him, Murrie mustered everything to retaliate. "But this is ridiculous, Miss Wyatt – utterly shameful! How dare you impugn a fine man for the sake of your sick, morbid fictions?"

_No. Not fictions. _She glared up at him with blazing eyes._ But I will write them down one day. You mutilated me, but my books will be my children._

Murrie had no words left for her. Sick with a thousand emotions he could barely identify, let alone name, he turned and strode out of the women's ward, away from the still white figure whose eyes were as pitiless as those of Judgement herself.

The next day, he heard of her escape from the hospital.

**IV.**

He should have been a senior figure in the East London Hospital by now. Everyone thought as much, and yet none of them could identify exactly why Dr Murrie had not progressed in the ranks of the medical profession. He'd been at the East London for close on thirty years, yet, while lesser men had climbed the ladder's rungs to prestigious positions, Murrie remained a mere junior surgeon and demonstrator to the younger students.

It seemed clear that Sir Herbert was behind it all, but no-one could understand why. What on earth could Murrie have done to inspire such dislike in the hospital's director?

After Murrie's first few requests for transfer had been rejected without explanation, he'd resigned himself to his inferior position without further fuss. Only his demeanour – the quiet demeanour of the downtrodden – betrayed his awareness of what had been done to him. His colleagues began to avoid him, as the healthy instinctively know to avoid the diseased. Soon Murrie spent most evenings alone in the library and the laboratory, searching for a miracle cure for those disorders that seemed beyond human aid. His eyes ached from the incessant reading, jotting, searching for connections: still he pressed on, knuckling the pain from his sockets, taking the odd nip of whisky to dull the pain. He had to keep going, for only when he had found such a cure could he redeem his tattered reputation.

That evening he had to give just one anatomy class before he could return to his studies. Twenty young students were all assembled in the hospital's cellars, the freezing underground stone caverns which served as a mortuary. Though his teeth invariably began to ache with the chill of the place, Murrie felt almost glad at these sessions with the students. Here, at least, he met with respect. Here he could feel the brief warmth of their friendliness, before they began to learn how things were at this hospital.

"Well, gentlemen!" he called out, to a chorus of grateful murmurs. "Here we are again! And tonight, if memory serves me rightly, you'll be learning about the miracle of the respiratory system."

Slowly, he led the crowd to gather round the first of the cadavers, a wizened-looking woman who had expired in the tubercular wards not twenty-four hours back. "Our first case here is a consumptive, of about fifty years of age. Now I'm not about to tell you that the scarred lungs of a tubercular case are a pretty sight, but we've seen worse whilst _slicing up the beef_, have we not?"

The students giggled or grimaced in reply, and Murrie proceeded with his grisly task with all the detachment of a tailor cutting a panel from a bolt of cloth. Midway through the primary incision, one of the porters appeared at the top of the stairs.

"Mister Murrie – sorry, _Doctor_ Murrie – we've got a body out back which won't last much longer. We got her cheap, on account of her being found in the Thames. Can you do her next?"

"If she still has lungs and trachea, then certainly," Murrie smiled. "Bring her through, I'll be done with this one in half-an-hour."

Murrie finished the operation and demonstration, then turned to the sheeted form of the new cadaver. He lifted the sheet to reveal the face of a woman in her late thirties or early forties, her features bloated from drowning. Someone – not the porter – had sewn up her eyelids with wide black stitching. Her hair must have been long once, for whoever had found her had cut it off to sell. Now all that remained were irregular patches of pale brown draped like riverweed across a blue-white scalp. He frowned, then turned the head to one side. There, just above her right temple – he prodded gently again with his finger to make sure – was a small, grey-purple patch of skull that gave way lightly to his touch, fragile as shattered eggshell.

Whoever she was, she'd suffered a sharp blow to the head shortly before she'd died. Sharp enough to kill her outright? Probably. Had she been the victim of a robbery and murder? If she had, the dissection could no longer take place – the body would have to be wheeled back and the police notified.

Murrie contemplated his dilemma silently. Curse the porter for not checking the body properly before accepting it! The merest suspicion of murder would be a waste of the five or six pounds the hospital had paid for the thing, and a damn embarrassment into the bargain. If the woman were rich or titled, her dead body landing up on the dissector's slab would bring the East London Hospital into serious disrepute.

Something similar had happened at Christ's Hospital not a year back, and the papers had been full of it. "_GRAVE-ROBBING!_" the popular papers had bawled. "Rest in _pieces_!" the comedians in the music-halls had snickered. And now here he was, an unpopular member of staff and a natural scapegoat, faced with a potential scandal. The way of honour could lead to his own dismissal - whereas if he did what was easy a husband might never know what had happened to his wife, a family to their mother...

Taking a deep breath, he pulled the woman's hand from underneath the sheet. No ring on the wedding finger; no depression in the skin which would have signalled its recent removal. She wasn't married. No-one would miss her.

"Are you all right, Doctor?" came a student's voice from behind him.

"Fine, Grearson, fine," Murrie murmured, tucking the limb neatly beneath the sheet again. "I was just pondering whether the water would have damaged the body too much to proceed. It hasn't. Now, which of your stout-hearted and iron-stomached fellows would like to make the primary incision on this one?" With a flourish, he removed the sheet to display the body's pale length. "Any volunteers?"

He caught the stupefied expressions on the students' faces.

"She's been done already," one of the younger students said slowly. "Look at her, Doctor."

He looked, and saw. Saw the sinuous purple line that spanned the width of her abdomen like a cruel smile, the lasting remains of what had been done to her by his own hand. Her _hands_ – he snatched the right hand up again, looked at the finger-tips, saw swirls of white chalk upon them. Her features, bloated by water and age, regained their colour and grew sharper and fresher in his memory. Her sewn-up eyes opened, looked steadily up at him.

Her name formed on lips suddenly unable to speak.

"_Doctor?_"

He'd dropped his scalpel on the flagstones. Drained as he felt, he could not bear the blood-rush that would come from bending to retrieve it. "I – I'm not feeling – excuse me, boys, but I'm not able to take this session tonight. I'll go fetch – I'll fetch – someone else..."

Their stunned silence lasted until he had climbed the stairs and was well out of earshot.

Two hours later he sat alone in his office, those wretched events replaying again and again in his mind. What could he have done? What ought he to have done? She was a madwoman, nothing more than a madwoman, a pitifully crazed victim of her own senseless delusions, and if she had been murdered it could not have been more than a street-thief's fight over her purse and jewellery – who would want to kill a madwoman? Who could have had any possible reason to kill _her_?

Had she been killed? Or had it been a simple accident? If he'd only persevered, he'd have found whether hers was a death by drowning by the tell-tale presence of water in the lungs. And if there had been no water there – if she'd been dead before her immersion in the Thames – he could have told the police, given her name, reported her as a murder victim. Her face would have been photographed, preserved until her family had been told - until justice had caught up with her killers.

But he hadn't had the courage to stay and bear witness. Now she was dissected, and what remained was trussed in a sheet, ready for a pauper's burial in a mass grave. No-one would ever know what had happened to her.

He froze as he heard the sound of frantic scratching. _Leave me alone_, he pleaded wordlessly with the presence which could not be there beside him. _Leave me alone_.

The sweep of cloth across a stone, then the scratching started again.

_I did what I thought was right. I never asked to be your last hope. For the love of God, leave me alone -_

He closed his eyes, knowing that if he dared to open them she would be standing there in the room in her sodden lavender dress, and that her gaze would be fixed upon him. Her gaze as he last remembered it, now filled with all the disgust and contempt of the unavenged dead.

_I did what I thought was right, _he whispered brokenly to himself.

But he knew it would not save him.

**THE END**


End file.
